Scammers hijacking corporate brands for online profit are ramping up their efforts, a new report has said.

Scammers hijacking corporate brands for online profit are ramping up their efforts, a new report has said.

Dubbed "brandjacking" by MarkMonitor, a San Francisco brand protection service provider, the practice is becoming a major threat to household names. "Not only is the volume of these abuses significant, but abusers are becoming alarmingly savvy marketers," said Frederick Felman, MarkMonitor's chief marketing officer.

In its first Brandjacking Index report, MarkMonitor tracked 25 of the top 100 brands for three weeks by monitoring illegal or unethical tactics that ranged from cybersquatting to pay-per-click fraud. Media companies made up the greatest percentage of targeted brands, said MarkMonitor, which pegged media's slice of brandjacking at 31 percent.

"Media companies are under attack due to the value of their brands and contents as well as the traffic their good names drive," the report said. "The most trafficked brands draw the most abuse."

Cybersquatting, which usually means registering a URL that includes a real brand's name, easily took the prize for most threats. MarkMonitor tracked more than 286,000 instances in the three-week span.

But none of the threats MarkMonitor watched worked alone. Cybersquatting, for instance, is usually combined with other abuses, such as pay-per-click fraud and domain kiting. The latter practice, which MarkMonitor said was mostly directed at financial brands, involves registering a domain, populating it with pay-per-click links from search engines like Google, which pay them a fee for click-throughs, then abandoning the domain before the five-day refund grace period expires.